After years of plotting and daydreaming of travels abroad, this winter finally marked my first international adventure. From December 22 to January 1, I traversed the jungles, caves, towns, and Mayan ruins of mainland Belize, explored the sprawling remnants of the ancient city of Tikal in Guatemala, and snorkeled, fished, and relaxed off the coast of San Pedro.

This past Saturday, Emily and I had the opportunity and the calling to attend the 2018 Women's March OKC at the state capitol. If you follow us regularly, we hope it is clear that feminism is an integral part of our identity as individuals and as a business. There are a lot of issues we are passionate about, but this is one of our primary driving forces.

It's a new year and we're excited to announce that we have a new commitment for 2018! While Toast is and will always be our priority, we have joined the leadership team of DSN+DEV+OKC, which is a creative networking and meetup community for designers and developers in the OKC metro.

Yesterday, Tiffany and I had the opportunity to participate in an AMA (Ask Me Anything, or a Q&A style conversation) with some folks in the DSN+DEV+OKC slack channel. DSN+DEV+OKC is a creative community for designers and developers in the OKC metro area.

I recently had the pleasure of traveling to wine country in California with a handful of my favorite people. It's probably not surprising given the name of our company that I love wine, so this was a dream trip. We visited a variety of wineries for tastings and food pairings and tours, and I'm excited to share some of the highlights with you.

Through your business journey, you'll hear a lot of terms tossed around that you may or may not be familiar with. For some of our clients, these are "logo," "identity," and "brand." If you're in this camp, read on and we will define the subtle differences between these three tricky terms.

If you know anything about Emily, you probably know that Pride & Prejudice is one of her all-time favorite books. So it's not surprising that Elizabeth Bennet tops our list of favorite women in fiction.

At the end of 2016, we gathered some of our work from the year and prepared entries for the American Advertising Awards in OKC (the ADDYs). These are put on by the OKC Advertising Club, and there are district competitions held all across the nation to recognize excellence in advertising.

We are excited to share that we won two ADDY awards – a gold and a bronze – both for logo designs.

Work-life balance is hard enough, but how do you maintain any semblance of sanity when you have two careers? When you go to work from 8 to 5 and are passionate about what you're doing, and then come home and dive into your freelance work and invest your heart and soul into it?

One of our daily goals for Toast is to seek out and surround ourselves with inspiration from other women, creatives, and entrepreneurs. Through this, we stumbled across the Being Boss podcast, run by Emily Thompson and Kathleen Shannon (a fellow Okie!) and targeted for creative entrepreneurs. This is now one of our favorite sources for advice and conversation, and this week, Emily and Kathleen challenged their followers to talk about what it means to Be Boss. So, here we go.

It wasn't until I was an adult and developed my own athletic pursuits that I could really appreciate the full magnitude of the Summer Olympics. Now, its myriad events serve as major inspiration in my life, not only in the realms of fitness, but through understanding the level of dedication and perseverance it takes every single athlete to achieve greatness.